


Fugue Station

by akadiene



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-11
Updated: 2017-06-11
Packaged: 2018-11-12 16:37:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11165811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akadiene/pseuds/akadiene
Summary: There are doors where I don’t remember there being any before.





	Fugue Station

**Author's Note:**

> Written post 'Change of Mind'. My podcast blog is [fattaacos](http://www.fattaacos.tumblr.com).

I don’t know where the forks go in the mess hall now.

Well, I do. I do, they go in the fourth drawer on the left, of course. Eiffel's told me, Hera's told me. It’s just that before, the fourth drawer on the left was our junk drawer, Fisher called it, and our utensils were in the drawer next to it, on the right. So now I hesitate – a single beat of disorienting uncertainty – every day when I go to get a fork, or a spoon, or a mug, or. 

In fact the whole place feels different. It’s my ship – or, the same ship – but. The Hephaestus has changed. Not just the forks, nor the fact that I no longer sleep in the captain’s quarters, nor the fact that the comms room is messier, nor that Rhea is no longer here, surrounding me, replaced instead by Hera with her frantic inferiority complex a klick wide. But it’s like – after you go camping, and no matter how hard you try you can’t get your sleeping bag back into its carrier like it had been before. Or repacking your suitcase after a long trip, after you’ve accumulated knick-knacks and your clothes have been rumpled and dirtied and forced into a space now too small for them. 

But the skeleton of it is still there, mostly. The floor plans say it is, in any case. It's just that now there are things missing, or added, or moved, or new. Doors where I don’t remember there being any before. Times when I go left to get to the deck when I know instead I should be going right. Dead ends, new voices, updated lab equipment. Echoes of bright laughter, and nasal repetitions of the fucking manual, and then the perpetual flirting of the astro department. Like ghosts, possibly, or something more solid, something that makes the part of me I don't dare pull into the light if I can help it twist and hurt.

Of course there is more space, now. There are only four of us – five, if you count Hera, where before there were seven. So there is less clutter, less detritus that is a sign of lives being lived, less – less beeping, for one.

Is this, I wonder, is this how Selberg – Hilbert – feels every time? This sickness for a place that was never quite home and that I never really left? It’s not longing, or maybe it is, but a complicated sort of longing – like going away to college and moving away from my community, and not necessarily missing it, but – missing being recognized, being known. 

As it is I barely even know myself. Sometimes as I float through the corridors alone I don’t think I am myself. 

 

 


End file.
